Rowan Willaims, Ed Miliband, AS Byatt and many others choose their essential reads of the past year, Leo Hollis on London's architectural future

Tha Shard: "the architectural hubris of the previous decade has turned our dreams into steel and glass" according to Leo Hollis (Photo by Jesse Toksvig-Stewart/Getty Images)

In the Critics section of this week’s New Statesman, the magazine’s friends and contributors choose their books of the year. The Labour leader, Ed Miliband, chooses Robert Harris’s financial thriller The Fear Index and the political philosopher Michael Sandel’s What Money Can’t Buy as his favourite reads from 2012. Sandel, Miliband writes, “makes a powerful argument that applying market values where they don’t belong . . . can corrode our ideas of right and wrong”. His shadow cabinet colleague Ed Balls, a keen cook, chooses the second volume of Nigel Slater’s Kitchen Diaries.

The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, singles out If You Sit Very Still by Marian Partington, whose sister Lucy was murdered by Fred and Rose West. “Her spiritual journey . . . is as moving as anything I’ve ever read on such a subject,” Williams says.

Leading novelists offer their choices: AS Byatt praises Jenny Uglow’s Pinecone; Ali Smith chooses Peter Hobbs’s second novel, In the Orchard, the Swallows; Margaret Drabble plumps for Salman Rushdie’s memoir Joseph Anton; and Colm Tóibín chooses a new edition of The Book of Kells.

Elsewhere, Leo Hollis’s architectural review questions the future of Britain’s built landscape. “Already Renzo Piano’s building-objects has come to symbolise the confused and anxious state of the city” he notes of the Shard as he charts the rise of the ‘starchitect’ and questions the government’s plans to “to restart the economy through bricks and mortar”.

Elsewhere in the Critics: Rachel Cooke reviews Channel 4’s The Aristocrats, Ryan Gilbey takes a look at Silver Linings Playbook, Alexandra Coghlan on Ceclia Bartoli at the Barbican, Antonia Quirke on Radio 4’s A Place for Us, and Will Self’s Real Meals.